Fwd:They're Throwing Journalists Into Jail Right Here In The USA

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Fri, 12 Nov 2004 21:30:53 -0800 (PST)

Subject:Fwd:They're Throwing Journalists Into Jail Right Here In The USA

 

 

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Featured in Columns & Editorial

 

They're Throwing Journalists Into Jail Right Here In The USA

 

 

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published on 11/11/2004

 

Paging China! Help us! Urge the U.S. government to respect freedom of

the press!

 

It does sound topsy-turvy, doesn't it? Generally, it's China and

Zimbabwe that are throwing journalists in prison, while the U.S.

denounces the repression over there.

 

But now similar abuses are about to unfold within the United States,

part of an alarming new pattern of assault on American freedom of the

press. In the last few months, three different U.S. federal judges,

each appointed by President Ronald Reagan, have found a total of eight

journalists in contempt of court for refusing to reveal confidential

sources, and the first of them may go to prison before the year is

out. Some of the rest may be in prison by spring.

 

The first reporter likely to go to jail is Jim Taricani, a television

reporter for the NBC station in Providence. Taricani obtained and

broadcast, completely legally, a videotape of a city official as he

accepted an envelope full of cash.

 

U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres found Taricani in contempt for

refusing to identify the person he got the videotape from, and the

judge fined him $1,000 a day. That hasn't broken Taricani, so Torres

has set a hearing for Nov. 18 to decide whether to squeeze him by

throwing him in jail.

 

Then there's Patrick Fitzgerald, the overzealous special prosecutor

who is the Inspector Javert of our age. Fitzgerald hasn't made any

progress in punishing the White House officials believed to have

leaked the identity of the CIA officer Valerie Plame to Robert Novak.

But Fitzgerald seems determined to imprison two reporters who

committed no crime, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew

Cooper of Time, because they won't blab about confidential sources.

 

U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan is threatening to send them to

prison; a hearing is set for Dec. 8. As for Novak, he is in no

apparent jeopardy, for reasons that remain unclear.

 

Then there's a third case, a civil suit between the nuclear scientist

Wen Ho Lee and the government. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson held five

reporters who are not even parties to the suit in contempt for

refusing to reveal confidential sources.

 

In yet another case, the Justice Department is backing a prosecutor's

effort to get a record of telephone calls made by two New York Times

reporters uncovering all their confidential sources in the fall of

2001. Put all this together, and we're seeing a broad assault on

freedom of the press that would appall us if it were happening in

Kazakhstan.

 

Responsibility lies primarily with the judges rather than with the

Bush administration, except for the demand for phone records and for

the appointment of Inspector Javert as special prosecutor.

 

But it's probably not a coincidence that we're seeing an offensive

against press freedoms during an administration that has a Brezhnevian

fondness for secrecy.

 

We journalists are in this mess partly because we're widely seen as

arrogant and biased, and we need to wrestle seriously with those

issues. But when reporters face jail for doing their jobs, the

ultimate victim is the free flow of information, the circulatory

system of any democracy.

 

The Chinese government recently arrested Zhao Yan, a research

assistant for The New York Times in Beijing, and the Bush

administration has been very helpful about protesting the case. Maybe

Colin Powell can work out a deal: The Chinese government will stop

imprisoning journalists if the U.S. government will do the same.

 

Protecting confidential sources has been a sacred ethical precept in

publishing ever since John Twyn was arrested in 1663 for printing a

book that offended the king. Twyn refused to reveal the name of the

book's author, so he was publicly castrated and disemboweled, and his

limbs severed from his body. Each piece of his body was nailed to a

London gate or bridge.

 

So, on the bright side, we have evidently progressed.

 

In May, Iran's secret police detained me in Tehran and demanded that I

identify a revolutionary guard I had quoted as saying to hell with the

mullahs. My interrogators threatened to imprison me unless I revealed

my source. But after a standoff, the Iranian goons let me go.

Imprisoning Western journalists for protecting their sources was too

medieval, even for them. Let's hope the U.S. judicial system shows the

same restraint as those Iranian thugs.

 

Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times.

 

 

The Day Publishing Co., 2004

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